Â鶹Éç

Good morning. Exactly fifty years ago, the best-selling single f the week in the UK charts was: je t’aime…moi non plus. It was the first foreign language number one outdoing other pop classics like Bad Moon Rising, I’ll Never Fall in Love Again, and Lay Lady Lay. That same week another song in an even more exotic language reached number twelve. It was the Hare Krishna Mantra recorded by the Radha Krishna Temple. – you could say already a classic for the past 5,000 years.

The Beatles in that summer of ’69 had been working on their next album, Abbey Road. George Harrison used some of the Beatles studio time to record the mantra with the temple devotees. The song contains only three words: Hare, Krishna & Rama arranged in the form of a sixteen-word verse. The term mantra itself translates as: a sound vibration that can relieve the mind from anxiety.

A mantra is more than a prayer or human aspiration. It is considered a sacred and eternal sound vibration that harmonises us with a deeper reality. The Vedas claim that such mantras are universal and can be found in all faiths and wisdom traditions.

Even so, the Upanishad texts recommend that the Hare Krishna mantra is particularly effective when society seems overwhelmed by hypocrisy, quarrel and untruth. But, a mantra is not simply a way of distracting or relaxing the mind. It enables us to step back from the whirlwind of our thoughts and see the world more clearly.

As a teenager already intrigued by Indian philosophy, I learnt the mantra from Top of the Pops. Later I began to use it in meditation – especially when I faced some irresolvable situation. Each time, I had the same experience of peace and a strange joy inside. I would chide myself for this feeling when my problems were surely still there. But, from my new vantage point, those problems no longer seemed as daunting. I could now see through them to a positive resolution. The idea is that the mantra detaches us from preconceptions and the emotions, fears and worries arising from our problems –from the need to confront the issues.

At a time when emotions on all sides run high over Brexit deadlocks and deadlines; climate change and Extinction Rebellion; and, across the pond, the controversies surrounding the American president; I feel we need such spiritual techniques to reduce the power that our anxieties, strident passions and assured convictions have over us. Some process that might give us greater clarity to perceive potential win-win solutions where none seemed to exist before.

Show less